Seeded faults are convenient: Easy to create and providing a perfect
ground truth, they allow researchers to run experiments with
very large numbers of faults on almost any system.
For example, fault localization techniques were often evaluated on
artificially seeded
single-edit faults, such as those in the Siemens test
suite [1]} (e.g.,
[2]}, [3]}, [4]}, [5]}, [6]}).
Researchers have been critical of this style of evaluation, arguing
that seeded single-edit faults are not representative of most
real faults (which often require fixes in multiple locations) [7]}, [8]} and that that fault localization techniques may not
generalize as they are over-optimized
in finding such simple single-edit faults [2]}.

